Progress Notes: Week 12

This week I did the important work of reconfiguring my working thesis. I established my two main points of interest as being the removal/ displacement of working class and longtime residents in San Francisco and the influx of new wealthy residents working in high wage jobs/ modern industries. New wealthy residents are seen as the direct reason for why working class and longtime residents are being displaced from San Francisco. My main focus will be on the structures and institutions that maintain the processes that allow wealthy residents to live in San Francisco while removing others. 

I have done some reading this week and have started to uncover some of the major policies that contribute to this process. One important policy is the 1985 Ellis Act that allows landlords to evict tenants under the premise that they “are going out of business” or using rooms to house their family. However, there is a lot of ambiguity in the fine print that allows landlords to pretend to house their relatives despite having no familial connection (and these tenants often pay higher rents than previous owners). Additionally, the Ellis Act allows apartments to be converted into “tenancies in common” which are a form of cooperative but are still owned by the original landlord. Also shady is the fact that many of these landlords own other buildings at the same time and are thus seeking to make higher profits (which is not “going out of business” as the original law implied). Another relevant policy I found was proposition M that limited new office space construction but incentivized converting old industrial buildings into office space. Industries requiring office spaces (including finance, information, and technology) began to spread beyond their original center in downtown. Public services available in the areas were then exhausted by incoming office workers. A 1978 plan to downzone during Mayor Feinstein’s administration is also seen as highly relevant in a lot of literature because it limited where new apartments could be built and what their size could be. More recent relevant policies are specific quotas for ‘affordable’ housing in new apartment buildings, and the Small Site Acquisition Program. In my readings I also found a lot of relevant statistics on employment rates and found that the unemployment had dropped from 6% in 1998 to 3.4% in 2001, and jobs continuously increased. Another highly relevant statistic is that by 1990, the city had 550,835 jobs and 328,471 housing units. From 1985 to 2017, SF only built 57,400 units. What I uncovered was that certain policies prevented new affordable housing to be built, zoning laws allowed changes in land use effectively incentivizing evictions of renters, and landlords were given legal loopholes to evict people easily while driving up rent prices. 

While I have been able to gain a clearer picture of how policy has shaped laws surrounding renters, I have not yet found out the role played by companies employing new residents. I have also not yet looked at the strategies employed by landlords themselves as they seek to make higher profits.